How long can an air conditioner run on the Sorein Power Station?Updated a day ago
An air conditioner is the most energy-hungry appliance in your RV. Generally speaking, you should plan to use air conditioning sparingly. But how long can you run an air conditioner on a Sorein Power Station?
A rule of thumb for Dometic Penguin air conditioners
The short answer, for people who have Dometic Penguin 13.5k or 15k BTU air conditioners on their roof, is that every Sorein Extra Battery you have will give you about 60 to 90 minutes of air conditioner "runtime".
"Runtime" is the length of time that the air conditioner is actually cooling. So if it cycles on and off, the effective time that you have air conditioning will be longer.
The long (but more accurate) answer
Before we launch into calculations, let's keep a few things in mind.
First, different air conditioner brands have different rates of power consumption, so you'll need to know the approximate power draw of your air conditioner. Unfortunately, the manufacturers don't always supply that information. (This blog explains why.)
The amount of power also varies according to the temperature and humidity outside. High heat and humidity force the air conditioner to work harder.
You can determine the amount of power your air conditioner is using at any given time, just by observing the front panel of the Sorein Power Station, with the air conditioning off and then after turning it on. In the photo below, the Sorein is outputting 1666 watts, mostly to run a 15K BTU Dometic Penguin II air conditioner, while receiving 226 watts from solar panels.
Second, keep in mind that the air conditioner is not be the only appliance using the power station. When you plug your RV into the power station, everything is energized, which means the onboard power converter will start charging the RV batteries, among other things. So your air conditioning time will be reduced by the amount of power you're using for other things at the same time.
How to calculate the expected runtime for your situation
Some simple math will allow us to estimate how much more time an extra battery would give you.
One Sorein Extra Battery has 2160 watt-hours of capacity. That's atop the 1,030 watt-hours in the Sorein Power Station itself, for a total of 3,190 watt-hours when fully charged.
Let's say that you have a Dometic Penguin 15k air conditioner, which in our experience uses 1600 to 1700 watts when running. Divide the battery capacity by the consumption rate of the air conditioner and you have the runtime.
In this case 3190 watt-hours ÷ 1600 watts equals 1.99 hours. However, because the power draw of your air conditioner varies, and also because other electrical items in the RV will be consuming power at the same time, you should not expect to get exactly that length of runtime.
People with the new high-efficiency inverter air conditioners by Furrion, Gree, Houghton, and GE will do much better. We've been told that the Gree Air conditioner reportedly uses about 950 watts, the RecPro Houghton uses about 1,400, and the GE installed in new Trade Wind trailers consumes about 1,200 watts. In those cases, you'd get a lot more runtime from a single Sorein extra battery.